A Cry for Atonement

As a religious Jew deeply committed to the survival of Israel and the Jewish people,
this is a moment of great pain and sadness. Every night I watch Palestinians being killed
as they throw rocks or aim rifles at young Jewish soldiers.

My own son served in the Israeli army a few years ago in a combat unit on the West
Bank. So when I watched on television Palestinians dipping their hands in the blood of two
Israeli soldiers whose bodies they had just thrown from a second story window after
stabbing them to death, I was sickened and shocked. I cried. It could have been my own
son.

I deplore the violence. Yet in my view there can be no end to the violence until Israel
withdraws its troops from the West Bank and Gaza, provides significant compensation for
the families of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes in 1948 (with
corresponding compensation from Arab lands for Jews who fled Arab oppression in
1948-1954), and tells its 250,000 Jewish West Bank settlers to move back to the pre-1967
bordersor tells them that if they remain they must live according to the laws of a
new Palestinian state.

The Palestinian people participated in a massive evil when they refused to allow Jewish
refugees from Hitler's Europe to settle in the land of Palestine and create their own
national self-determination there. But the subsequent expulsion of Palestinians from their
homes, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the systematic oppression that both
Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have faced from Israelis is another massive evil.

I have called upon the Palestinian people to adopt nonviolence in their
struggleboth because it is the only moral path and because it would prove far more
effective in dismantling Jewish fears than has violence and terrorism. It is a disservice
to the Palestinian people to refrain from critiquing their means of struggle on the
grounds that they must know best since it is they who are suffering. Sometimes people who
are victims have impaired judgmentand those who wish to support them need to give
them strong advice about what is likely to work.

And yet doesn't it seem incredible that the Jewish people feel so scaredthey
have one of the most powerful armies in the world and are facing people that have no
effective means to protect themselves from Israeli tanks and helicopters. What the
Palestinians are facing is the paranoid consciousness of a people that has been brutalized
by 1,700 years of Christian oppression.

For much of this period, Jews were legally and de facto treated as sub-humans,
periodically subject to outbursts of Christian violence (particularly around Easter time),
and constantly subject to harassment, rape, and murder. All this culminated in a genocide
in which one out of every three Jews alive at the time was murdered. And while some
Christians today have been willing to stop perpetuating demeaning stories about the Jews,
most have never engaged in any systematic attempt to educate their own communities about
the actual history of Christian anti-Semitism and how it prepared the world for a legacy
of hate that could easily be mobilized by demagogues like Hitler.

One of my goals in starting Tikkun magazine was to begin the process of healing
some of those wounds (tikkun is a Hebrew word meaning "healing and
transformation"). Jews must move beyond the trauma of the past and recognize that the
Palestinian people are not the Christians who oppressed us. Unless they do so we risk the
possibility of creating new generations of people who will point to Israeli actions as a
reason to revive anti-Semitic attitudes.

Unfortunately, the second intifada that began in October has set back the forces
of peace and reconciliation. My own actions, including dedicating part of our Yom
Kippur-Day of Atonement services to atoning for the sins of the Occupation, have been met
with hostility, death threats to me personally, and cancellations of subscriptions to Tikkun
magazine.

Our Christian friends and allies could help by a) taking greater public efforts to
combat the legacies of anti-Semitism; b) urging Palestinian Christians to build a
nonviolent movement of resistance to Israeli occupation; c) organizing a nonviolent peace
corps to go to Israel and the West Bank as a moral witness for peace and justice; d)
subscribe to Tikkun magazine as an act of solidarity.

Ultimately peace can only happen when Israel open-heartedly embraces the Palestinian
people and accepts their right to full national self-determination and economic well
being.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, author of the new book Spirit
Matters, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco.

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